Jails Should Serve Only Vegan Food

Obviously

Imagine that people who committed crimes really liked torturing animals. When they were sent to prison, they were allowed to bring the animals that they liked torturing to prison with them. As a result of this, they were less worried about going to prison, because they’d still be allowed to torture the animals, which brings them lots of enjoyment. It seems that, were this the case, the obvious thing to do would be to prohibit them from torturing animals while in prison.

This would be worth doing for two reasons. The first one is that animal torture is bad, and it’s good to prevent bad things. But the second would be deterrence; if we want to deter crime, it makes sense to make prisons unpleasant. Ideally, we want to do this in minimally grotesque ways—for example, we should be opposed to torturing prisoners. But if there’s something very bad that prisoners are doing, which would deter them if prohibited, then we should prohibit it.

For this reason, it seems like a complete no-brainer that prisons should serve only vegan food. This is precisely analogous to the animal torture thought experiment. Prisoners consume meat and enjoy it, however, if they were prohibited from consuming meat, this would have a deterrent effect. When they consume meat, this causes animal torture. Thus, the scenario in the actual world is precisely the same as in the thought experiment that I used to begin the article; prisoners torture animals because it’s fun, and banning it would have a deterrent effect.

Of course, this will strike some people as grotesque. People seem to have a bizarre aversion to using either carrots or sticks to get people to go vegan. Perhaps the most bizarre manifestation of this was widespread backlash to PETA offering to pay the water bills of Detroit families if they went vegan.

This backlash was completely insane. It’s not immoral for organizations not to pay the water bills of Detroit families, and paying the bills conditional on going vegan is clearly better than not paying it at all—this offer cannot harm Detroit families and can only benefit them. So PETA did nothing even remotely immoral. If one conditions a benefit on people ceasing to pay for torture and murder, they’re not doing anything wrong. And yet, because people get alarmed at anything that has even a whiff of forcing veganism on people, there was widespread backlash. Apparently, it’s perfectly fine not to pay the water bills of Detroit families, but if you condition paying it on them ceasing to do immoral things, that’s deeply wrong, at least, according to upside-down moon logic.

People might worry that this is cruel. However, this complaint is clearly a byproduct of status quo bias—for forcing prisons to be vegan is far less cruel than many of the things that occur in our criminal justice system. Currently, prisoners are sent to live for decades in a small box, often with little space, surrounded by violent maniacs, where rapes and beatings are common. Around 4% of people in prisons report being raped each year, which is probably an underestimate, so it’s hard to see how requiring them to eat quinoa is anywhere near as cruel.

We have this bizarre sentimentality around our criminal justice system where we refuse to accept that it is and must be brutal. Nearly everyone agrees that serious criminals should be in prison for decades—but that’s an incredibly brutal punishment. I’d much rather be publicly beaten than imprisoned for even 9 months, especially if jail went on my permanent record. Prison is far crueler, thus, than even public floggings, as is shown by the nearly ubiquitous preference to be flogged rather than imprisoned.

Thus, if we are to have a criminal justice system, it will have to be cruel and ruin people’s lives. Of course, we don’t want it to be overly punitive, but we want it to be punitive enough that it is a serious harm. Prisons are that way, but we just sort of pretend that they’re not. Very few people think that public beatings would be acceptable, strangely, but nearly everyone supports a far crueler (and probably less effective at deterring) fate.

So because of this, the fact that a fate seems cruel to us should not disqualify it from being part of the criminal justice system. If our reaction to a proposal is “that sounds barbaric” this should not count against it. The criminal justice system is barbaric, and it needs to be if we are to have one.

There’s a very strong animal welfare-based reason to make prisons vegan. The average meat eater will consume about 2,400 chickens over the course of their lives, so for each prisoner who goes vegan, plausibly hundreds or thousands of chickens are averted from horrifying torture, not to mention the other animals that people eat. And it would clearly deter people—imagine testosterone-heavy gang members knowing that, if they commit a crime, it will be quinoa, lentils, and oats for the next few decades.

Maybe one thinks that the criminal justice system is too punitive, deters too much, and thus it should be less cruel. If so, then they should support pairing this with a reduction in sentence length. If the worry is that this would increase the punitiveness of the criminal justice system, then if paired with a decrease in punitiveness, it should be obviously good. Additionally, preventing millions or billions of innocent beings from being gruesomely tortured is obviously more important than prisoners having delicious-tasting food.

Many won’t be convinced by this. But I don’t think that there’s a good argument against it. The concerns just seem like a rationalization of status quo bias and a refusal to grapple with the hard realities of the criminal justice system. This idea seems to be unpopular for the same reason that lethal injection is more popular than the guillotine; while we all tacitly recognize that those who commit crimes are being mistreated, it upsets our stomachs to think about it, so we prefer it to be done smoothly, out of sight, and out of mind.